


Someone Warned Me Of This Hell

by axumun



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Gen, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 04:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axumun/pseuds/axumun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jareth's orb became a book, which he flipped through aimlessly with flicks of a gloved finger. "Her nightmares are no longer with her. They're roaming free. They must be slain."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone Warned Me Of This Hell

"Wake up! Wake up!" Little Willow was dwarfed by her big sister, and shaking her shoulders proved almost useless. "Alyss! Come on! You have to wake up!"

Alyss's screaming subsided to a frustrated, animalistic whine, then she panted, slowly opening her eyes. Willow watched her sister's eyes flood with recognition. "Again?" she whispered, her voice hoarse, breathing harshly.

"Again," Willow confirmed.

"Did I wake Mom and Dad?"

Willow held up a finger and waited for a rustling of bedsheets, a murmur of concern. She shook her head; her ears only detected silence. "No. But we gotta tell them, Aly; they're getting worse."

Usually, Alyss would protest, but tonight, she nodded. "I'm starting to _feel_ them. Before I would just see...these red eyes and weird shapes. But I felt good. I knew I was dreaming. Now I feel them...they grab me, scratch me, pull me...Whoever said dreams can't hurt you was so, so wrong."

Willow hopped off of the bed, turning to leave.

Alyss breathed in too quickly. "Stay, Willa?"

She'd been right about many things, Willow thought as she obliged, crawling into the empty space in bed, clutching her sister's hand to keep the darkness away. Back when Alyss had her first shouting fit in the middle of the night, she'd begged Willow to keep quiet about it. There were so many things no one would believe.

No one would believe that the daughter of a state-renowned phsyciatrist was having night terrors that messed with her schoolwork, her ability to walk straight, to breathe.

No one would understand how a seventeen-year-old track-star honor-student needed the comfort of a nine-year-old in messy pigtails.

And not even Alyss could explain the scratches on her legs, the bruises on her arms. She couldn't tell the truth: _the darkness did it_. No matter who she went to, they'd be phoning CPS as soon as she rolled up her sleeves, and she'd never see her family again.

*  
"You were up pretty late last night, girls," their father said, sitting down, shoving fried eggs down his throat as gracefully as possible. He was running late. Fashionably.

"Yeah. I heard you talking." Mom sipped her coffee.

 _But you didn't hear me screaming_ , Alyss thought, hiding an eye roll.

Willow and Alyss looked at each other from across the table. They needed very few words to communicate with each other.

"Aly's having nightmares," Willow said softly. This was the moment Alyss had dreaded for weeks. 

Dad's plate was already empty. He turned to his wife, ignoring to matter at hand completely. "Honey, I gotta go, can you talk to them? Thanks." He gave her a peck on the cheek and scurried out the door. He hadn't waited for an answer.

"How bad is it?" Mom inquired, seeming exasperated about having the responsiility of finding the answers.

Alyss shuddered. "Terrible. I can't even begin..."

Mom just shrugged. "I told you not to eat Cap'n Crunch before bed, Aly, but when do you ever listen to me?"

"You told _Willow_ that. And I don't eat anything before bed. Ever."

Mom sighed. "What're they about?" She was in therapy mode now, having completely skipped over being a mother. She was smiling benignly and folding her hands stiffly in front of her.

"I'm being chased...by these creatures," Alyss forced out, though her mother's attitude toward helping her just made her want to shut up. "And they catch me. They hurt me. They try to kill me, Mom! I don't know how much more I can take..."

Mom put up a hand to shush her. Her daughters knew it was a reflex, but it still made both of them falter.

"Can you take one more night?" Mom asked. "If they come tonight, I'll take you to a doctor. Now hurry up and eat your corn flakes. Your bus comes in ten minutes, Aly."

Wilow could tell many things just by looking at people. She could tell that Alyss was about to ask to stay home.

She could also tell that Mom turned away to keep her daughter's question at bay.  
When Willow loked in a mirror, she could tell that she was in for a rough night.

*

There was a crazy boy in Willow's social studies whom she had reluctantly befriended out of pity, before she realized that sometimes he had interesting stories to tell. She was always first to hear them.

"My Grandma Sarah gave me this book last week for my birthday," he told her in a whisper while they worked on a map. "It's about a princess and a buncha goblins. It says when you know a kid you don't want around you can just say a few words and they'll go away forever. 'Cept Gram told me to never, ever say the words, even if I didn't mean them."

Willow nodded like she was interested, but this particular tale didn't capture her imagination like one might think. She liked the stories about the caterpillars he rescued from spiderwebs, the mussel shells he found on his beach vacations.

"Wanna know the words?"

She didn't, but the boy told her anyway.

"You say that and the person you want to go away will go to this faraway place called the Labyrinth. It's a magic world where anything can happen. But the point is you never have to see them again."

*

"I thought I saw them on my way to Chem," Alyss whispered when the lights went out. "I tripped down the stairs and everyone laughed at me."

Willow turned her gaze to the floor. "I have an idea," she murmured, like she was expecting to be ignored.

But Alyss could never ignore her. "What is it?" she asked, seeming excited by even the possibility of chasing the dark away.

"I'll keep the lights on." Willow got up and flicked the light switch, filling the room with soft light. "There. Now the darkness can't get you."

When Willow returned, Alyss wrapped her so tightly in her arms that she couldn't have escaped if she wanted to.

*

It seemed like a foolproof plan. Don't like the darkness? Turn on the light.

But there were shadows.

They conspired, then merged into one grotesque being, approaching unseen.

Willow woke immediately when her sister screamed. Listening for her sounds of distress had become as routine as brushing her teeth. Like every other night, she shook Alyss awake.

When she was pulled from the clutches of the black, tears welled in Alyss's eyes. "There's no way," she gasped. "They came anyway. There's no way..."

The bedroom door swung open, hitting the wall with an ear-splitting thump. Their mother didn't seem concerned, but furious.

"I told you at dinner that I have a very important meeting tomorrow, and your father has to be out the door very, very eary!" she bellowed, not taking into account the distress written across her children's faces. "Stop all this racket!"

"Mom!" Willow yelled, just to make herself heard. "They came back."

Mom sighed heavily, putting her whole body into it. "I can't stay home tomorrow. I can't. You're going to school and when you come home we'll go to the doctor's and figure out what the hell is wrong with you."

*

As it was, Mom's meeting was interrupted. 

The high school nurse called in the middle of her own presentation about how fear affects the mind and takes its toll during sleep. Of course, Alyss's mom was quite thick in the head, but just as she'd been about to fit the pieces together, reaizing that she was well equipped to handle her daughter's stigma, her cell phone lit up, cutting her of mid-sentence with its jazzy ring.

She picked Alyss up at around eleven. She'd seen a shadowy figure approaching her on her way to lunch and had run frantically, inadvertently knocking over a couple of teachers. But she hit a wall and, thinking she was caught, vomited right in the middle of the hallway, out of her mind with fear.

They went straight to her doctor, and Mom tried to use her title to get an instant appointment, but of course she had to wait like everyone else.

Almost as soon as the word "nightmare" came out of her mouth the doctor - a middle aged man with a scar on his temple - jotted something down on a pad of paper and handed it to her Mom, speaking to her in the language of medicine that Alyss gave up on translating long ago.

The prescription came in a couple of hours later, and Alyss washed the pills down with a mouthful of doubt. She'd heard of incompetency in the field of medicine, but had hoped it wouldn't rear its ugly head today. 

She was beginning to dread night. The thought of even laying in her bed made her stomach turn.

But by the time Willow got off her bus and came through the front door, Alyss was giddy and energetic, all of her fear erased. Relief filled both of them.

That night, Willow climbed into Alyss's bed, expecting her to follow, but her big sister shook her head. "Going to bed already? 'S funny, 'm not tired at all."

Willow frowned. "It's a schoolnight. We should sleep."

Alyss really did try. But when she closed her eyes, her medicine forced them open again.

While everyone else slept, Alyss tidied her room and wrote poetry, laughing hysterically simply because she was alive. She tried to remember a time when she'd felt happy for no reason at all.

Even the next day, when people she'd once called friends pushed her away after the previous morning's incident, she couldn't be bothered to be upset. Even when a teacher handed back a test she failed, taken on the day after one of her most debilitating night terrors, she was perpetually smiling.

The downside came that night (or, if you're specific enough, the next morning). Her clock read 12:54. She had just reorganized her bookshelves.

Suddenly she was tired. Not exhausted, really, but too tired to make doing anything else worthwhile. She lay down in bed. She kept all the lights on, just in case.

Then she realized she was indeed exhausted, sighing gratefully at the pillow under her head, the blankets wrapped around her body.

Her mind was blissfully lucid for a couple of hours.

But something changed. Something fluttered within the blackness of her subconscious, something hungry and alive. Glowing, bloodthirsty eyes opened, staring straight into her soul, and she knew she was sleeping but she couldn't wake up, even when Willow came - bless her soul - and shook her.

She couldn't wake up. He body was so taxed from a lack of sleep that it had shut down, locking Alyss within her mind, and all Willow could do was muffle her sister's yells and hold her, not knowing what else to do.

Minutes later, when Alyss had shouted her throat raw, going quiet but no less terrified, Willow desperately searched for anything to take the scary thoughts from Aly's head. She'd do anything...

Anything, even if it meant listening to a crazy boy. Even if it meant never seeing her sister again.

Willow took a deep, unsteady breath. She said, not accusingly but tenderly, "I wish the goblins would come and take you away. Right now."

She closed her eyes and collapsed on the bed. For long minutes nothing happened. There were no sounds but Alyss's occassional gasp or grunt. She should've known it wouldn't have worked. 

But maybe a world of magic would've taken the pain away. That's all Willow wanted.

"Please," she murmured, eyes still closed. She knew this wasn't part of the speech but now she was even more desperate. "Just make her wake up. Take the darkness away. Make her happy."

When Willow lifted her head again and opened her eyes, Alyss was gone.

There was a man there instead, with strangely-shaped eyebrows and wispy blond hair. His smile was devilish, but his eyes were friendly.

Willow gasped in fright. She was about to wake up her parents, but then she'd have to explain that she wished her sister away to an underground goblin realm.

"Hello, Willow," came a deep, unfamiliar voice. Stranger danger was written all over the room.

Willow shuddered. "Where is my sister?" she demanded, bold for her few years.

"You know very well where she is." His eyes became cold, accusing.

"You don't understand," Willow murmured feebly. "I love my sister. I'd never want her to go away forever. I just wanted her nightmares to go away."

"I've never heard that one before," the man said, amused. "Well, you don't seem to recognize me. Quite an interesting way to deal with a nightmare; calling upon a man whose name you don't even know. I am Jareth, the Goblin King, ruler of the Underground."

Willow nodded. "Keep it down," she asked of him. "Mom and Dad are asleep."

Jareth huffed a loud chuckle, then cleared his throat and smiled, indicating he would listen. He whispered, "My, my, how desperate you were indeed, to call upon a stranger, with the risk of being caught!"

"Is she okay?" Willow asked anxiously.

The Goblin King made a crystal orb materialize out of nowhere. He gazed into it thoughtfully. "She's asleep. But her nightmares are gone. My people are watching over her."

Willow's bright smile and sigh of relief deeply moved Jareth. "You," he began, "you'd like her back?"

Willow nodded, then faltered. "Only if the darkness stays away."

"Ah." Jareth's orb became a book, which he flipped through aimlessly with flicks of a gloved finger. "Her nightmares are no longer with her. They're roaming free. They must be slain."

The little girl blinked. "What're you saying?"

"You must slay her nightmares before they plague the minds of anyone else."

At the word 'slay', Willow's eyes had gone wide. "I've never...I can't..."

The book in Jareth's hands became a dreamcatcher woven with colorful thread and decorated with polished stones. At the end of it was a concealed dagger. Jareth hung it around Willow's neck carefully. "When you see one, you'll know. All you have to do is prick them with this blade. And don't look into their eyes, or you'll become one of them."

Willow swallowed hard. "I don't understand."

"You will, when you arrive. Look out the window."

Sure enough, the darknened sky had become a dulled orange. The suburb around them had faded, and in the distance there was a massive structure, taller and wider and more magnificent then any mortal city. Willow blinked, but when her eyes opened again, she and Jareth were outside, at the foot of a gate.

"You're a rare guest, Willow; a child with good intentions from the start. I promise the Labyrinth will be easy for you. I made sure of it. Now, I don't know how many there are or where they could be, but you must stop them before they enter another mind."

Willow wanted to ask, why me?, but she didn't want to sound bratty. She just wanted her sister.

As if he read Willow's mind, Jareth whispered as he faded away, "You're the only one they will actively chase. Be honored that they would stalk you, rather than just take over your mind."

*

A nice goblin at the front door opened it for Willow without any fuss or irritating riddles. The halls of stone had several turns, and there were many Underground residents roaming about, just waiting to her to ask for help.

"Excuse me," she asked of a tiny, blue-haired worm. He seemed content just watching the world around him. "I need to ask you something."

"Go 'ead, love," the worm replied, only startling Willow a little bit.

Willow leaned in close. "Have you seen any...Strange creatures? All shadowy with big red eyes?"

The worm nodded vehemently. "'ay, just down that way, sweetie, not too far."

The little girl looked down the direction the worm was motioning toward. "I just came from there."

"Oop, ne'er mind, dearie, my eyes are bad nowadays." The worm winked and crawled ino a hole in the wall.

An uncharacteristically lanky goblin popped out from around a corner. "I've seen this creature," she muttered to Willow.

"Where?" Willow asked, desperate as ever. 

"Follow me."

*

The goblin lead Willow to a pristine garden where her eyes locked on the form of what looked like a giant horse. She caught a glimpse of red above its snout and forced herself to look away.

"Easier than I thought," she said to the goblin. "Thank you!"

"It wants my brother," the goblin replied, clearly in distress. "Please don't let it get my brother."

"I won't," Willow promised, calculating her next moves.

Willow took a few silent, slow steps forward, testing the ground beneath her, then lunged, somehow landing on the mare's back. Its touch literally burned her hands. 

She unsheathed the blade and, closing her eyes tightly, struck it somewhere around where a shoulder blade should've been. The nightmare gave a blood-curdling cry sounding like something between a spooked squawk and the whine of a chainsaw.

The dreamcatcher absorbed a fluttering white light as the monster was swallowed by an even more sinister darkness.

"Oh, Jareth bless you, child! Thank you!" The goblin's arms wrapped around Willow's calves.

"No problem," Willow assured her. She inspected her reddened, throbbing fingers where they'd been exposed to pure darkness. "Are there any more?"

The goblin was silent for a long moment. Willow looked down at her, and oh no, oh God, no....

She was melting like the mare, screeching like a bat, twitching sickeningly as she deteriorated into a puddle at Wilow's feet. She had enough time to take a few staggering steps backward before the puddle rose up again in a nameless blob with beady, bloody eyes. 

The nightmare growled a few sharp, metallic words that were barely distinguishable: "Come! She's here! Come!"

At that, nightmares rose up from every surrounding shadow, circling Willow in a sick dance, screaming with delight at her fear.

Willow looked down, the only place to keep away from their eyes. She tried to figure out where to start. There were so many that if she just honed in on one, the others would be all over her.

"Host," they chanted as they closed in, making Willow want to scream, to cry, to throw up. One black tendril curled tightly around her wrist, branding her. With her other hand she clutched the dreamcatcher and thrust it blade-first at the attacking nightmare, making it wail in pain. The thread around her neck snapped, sending the dreamcatcher flying. The creature was subdued, and Willow's wrist was released, but of course, she was defensless now.

"Host. Host. Host."

Willow shivered, trying to run, trying to move at all. As soon as she got onto her feet she was knocked back again, burned by the mocking caress of an arm, a leg, a mouth.

"Host. Host. Host."

Willow wailed helplessly, and the nightmares cackled. They were amused by her terror, purposely waiting to rip her apart just to wring more screams from her taxed throat, watch tears fall unbidden from her hopeless eyes.

An idea occured to her.

She took a deep, controlling breath, and tried to think of something happy, funny, cute. Purring kittens, her sister's smile. Then she was laughing.

Willow heard a few confused gasps as she replaced one emotion with another - an emotion that seemed to cause the nightmares pain and immobilize them. Still giggling, Willow reached for the dreamcatcher and pushed the blade into the nearest nightmare's chest. The action sickened her, but she laughed harder, smiling so wide that her whole face was hot and aching.

She repeated this like a routine, until all of the nightmares were gone. Willow took another deep breath to cease the laughter that hadn't stopped on its own.

Willow looked around, noticing that Jareth had inconspicuously appeared, his arms folded, quietly proud.

"I believe you've done it," Jareth told her.

The dreamcatcher clutched in Willow's white-fingered grip was glowing. "What's that?"

"Shards of Alyss's...better dreams," Jareth answered. "All nightmares evolve from good dreams, believe it or not. I should give these back to her." He picked it up and it disappeared in his grip.

Willow brightened. "Can I see her now?"

"I can send you both home. But I hope I'll not have to do this again. Chasing nightmares was not in my job description." He gave a final smile.

*

Alyss tossed and turned restlessly for a moment before opening her eyes. "Willa? What're you doing here?"

"Are they gone?" Willow watched her sister's face carefully.

Alyss thought about it. "Yeah. I never saw them last night." She looked at Willow with amiable suspicion. "Did you do something?"

"Maybe," Willow answered, and they laughed quietly.

*

Willow considered thanking the crazy boy; if not for him, Alyss might still have had her night terrors.

Instead, she asked to borrow the book.

When she read aloud its most famous passage, she wasn't speaking to the Goblin King as the writer had intended. 

She read, "You have no power over me," as she turned off Alyss's bedroom light. If the darkness didn't return tonight, she'd know she succeeded.

They let Alyss sleep.


End file.
